What they’re "protecting" us from – Anil Dash It's a choice whether you, or anyone else, wants to accept the falsehood that liberal values are somehow in contradiction with business success at a global scale. Indeed, it would seem that many who claim to be pro-business are trying to "save" us from exactly the inclusive, creative, tolerant values that have made America's most successful company possible. I side with the makers, the creators, and the inventors, and it's about time that the pack of clamoring would-be politicians be put on the defensive for attacking the values of those of us on this side.

What they’re "protecting" us from – Anil Dash It's a choice whether you, or anyone else, wants to accept the falsehood that liberal values are somehow in contradiction with business success at a global scale. Indeed, it would seem that many who claim to be pro-business are trying to "save" us from exactly the inclusive, creative, tolerant values that have made America's most successful company possible. I side with the makers, the creators, and the inventors, and it's about time that the pack of clamoring would-be politicians be put on the defensive for attacking the values of those of us on this side.

The way Potter sees it, Gov. Rick Scott is now "doing exactly what he falsely claimed federal reform would do."

Now working as a senior analyst at the Center for Public Integrity, Potter says Scott used to be at the forefront in the crusade against the so-called "Obamacare," and even though the governor wasn't dropping facts about the new program, he's doing exactly what he led people to believe would happen — limit competition.

Why Some Politicians Are More Dangerous Than Others "What Gilligan found was that suicides and homicides started climbing to epidemic levels following the election of a Republican president. If that isn't annoying enough to the Grand Old Party, he also discovered that the rates remained around epidemic levels throughout the time Republicans occupied the White House."

Cocos2D Tutorial – Dynamically Coloring Sprites [Brandon Trebitowski, brandontreb.com] Have you ever seen a game (such as Tiny Tower) that contains similar sprites that only vary by certain attributes (coloring, shading, accessories, etc…)? I would often wonder how long it would take the artists to create each permutation of these sprites. After discovering that you can call a method on a CCSprite called setColor, I realized how most of this customization is done in code.

Muddying the Budget Waters With Social Security Many people misunderstand how the program operates. Payroll taxes stream into the trust fund that is used to pay current retirees’ benefits. When there is a surplus, that money is invested in a special type of Treasury bond that pays interest to the trust fund. At the end of last year, the trust fund had about $2.6 trillion. And though last year was the first year since 1983 that the fund paid out more than it received in tax revenue, it still continued to grow because of the interest accrued — and it is estimated to continue to grow through 2022.

Since the money in the trust fund is held in Treasury securities, taxes collected are essentially being lent to the federal government to pay for whatever it wants (and this allows the government to borrow less from the public).

The Cult of Centricism We have a crisis in which the right is making insane demands, while the president and Democrats in Congress are bending over backward to be accommodating — offering plans that are all spending cuts and no taxes, plans that are far to the right of public opinion.

So what do most news reports say? They portray it as a situation in which both sides are equally partisan, equally intransigent — because news reports always do that. And we have influential pundits calling out for a new centrist party, a new centrist president, to get us away from the evils of partisanship.

The reality, of course, is that we already have a centrist president — actually a moderate conservative president.

Structured Procrastination the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important. Structured procrastination means shaping the structure of the tasks one has to do in a way that exploits this fact.

18 Signs That Life In U.S. Public Schools Is Now Essentially Equivalent To Life In U.S. Prisons In the United States today, our public schools are not very good at educating our students, but they sure are great training grounds for learning how to live in a Big Brother police state control grid. Sadly, life in many U.S. public schools is now essentially equivalent to life in U.S. prisons. Most parents don't realize this, but our students have very few rights when they are in school. Our public school students are being watched, tracked, recorded, searched and controlled like never before.

CocosBuilder – Graphical Interface Builder for Cocos2D CocosBuilder is a free graphical editor for building scene graphs in Cocos2D (iPhone & Mac). With CocosBuilder you can visually layout your objects and load them with a single line of code. Please note that this is still a very early version, the interface is very unpolished and it probably contains lots of bugs. Use at your own risk!

Huckabee pal Janet Porter believes Obama is a Soviet Spy Mike Huckabee is the scariest GOP candidate. He hides his evangelical extremism behind an aw-shucks facade so successfully that even normally astute people like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are fooled by it. There is nothing friendly about Huckabee’s beliefs, nor in his advisors like Janet Porter. Scary, scary people who wouldn’t think twice about sending liberal, secular humanists like myself to re-education camps.